Jupiter Media Metrix predicts that the average Email address will receive 40 times as many Emails as it is receiving now by the year 2005. Even at current levels, consumers show a concern about protecting their Email inboxes against unwanted Email (hereafter referred to as “spam”). At the same time consumers must constantly relinquish their Email address to third parties in the course of availing themselves of the many products and services that are offered on the Web. Individuals also find it necessary or useful to communicate with many private individuals by Email temporarily, yet do not necessarily wish to grant these individuals long-term access to their Email inbox. But reviewing and discarding commercial Emails takes time and effort and many individuals resent their inability to shield themselves against this unwanted intrusion.
Many people like or need to be immediately notified when Emails come in, and enable features in their Email application that provide them with visual or auditory signals to alert them of an incoming Email. To those individuals the unwanted interruption of unwanted Email is even more bothersome. In addition, wireless devices have limited screen space, lower memory storage and longer download times, which all work to increase the productivity costs of unwanted Email.
A key problem which results from spam is that people are reluctant to publish their Email addresses in publicly available directories. Indeed, individuals who list their Email address in a public directory are likely to receive many additional unwanted commercial Emails. Spammers can simply retrieve their Email address from these public listings and use them to send commercial Email messages. Consumers who evade these spammers by declining to list their Email address in a public directory, also make their Email address unavailable to those who do not have their Email address, but might have a legitimate interest in contacting them. Contacting people by telephone is not always possible, because many numbers are not listed or otherwise not available. Even when it is possible, contacting people by phone to ask them for their Email address is inconvenient.
None of the current technologies and methods which allow consumers to protect themselves against unwanted Email, hold the promise of combating spam effectively enough to allow consumers to publish their Email addresses publicly. Such technologies described as follows:
Opt-In and Unsubscription
Some businesses especially those that regularly send third party advertisements by Email to a group of opt-in Email subscribers allow these subscribers to opt-out by replying to an Email or clicking on a link in the Email. However many companies do not. In addition, of the companies that do                many reserve the right to change their privacy policies, and        some release their Email addresses to third parties in the course of conducting business, even if their privacy policy says that will not do so. And:        Most privacy policies allow for Email addresses to be disclosed to third parties or to be sold or exchanged with business partners.        Even a binding promise not to sell or disclose an Email address to a third party does not survive company bankruptcy.        Many companies have insufficient safeguards against unauthorized or accidental disclosure of their consumer's Email addresses.        
Most importantly, even if a majority of companies voluntarily refrain from sending volume Emails, and take proper safeguards against unauthorized disclosure, advances in technology allow even a small group of spammers to send many hundreds of millions of unwanted Emails and to sell Email addresses to other spammers.
Legislation which would mandate that companies abide by the privacy policies that they publish may be passed in the future, but no legislation that generally prohibits sending Email to individuals who have not expressly given permission to receive such Email is expected due to first amendment concerns. Also any legislation would be difficult to enforce on the Internet due to its global reach and the ability to send Email messages from virtually anywhere outside the United States.
Hotmail and other Email providers allow consumers to “block senders” i.e. to block Emails coming from a particular Email address/outbox. However, senders can change their outgoing Email address at will so that this mechanism is not effective.
Some providers also refer Emails that are sent to multiple recipients on the same network to a separate Bulk Email folder. The problems with this mechanism are                Some Emails that are sent to multiple recipients are either private Emails that are sent by individuals to multiple recipients, or wanted newsletters or bulk Emails sent by businesses. Therefore, the Email recipient must still periodically review this folder as well for wanted Emails.        Technology exists currently, and is likely to be further developed, that allows senders to send Emails to many recipients in an reiterative process which simulates individual mailings. While there may be other technologies to counteract this, it is likely that the technologies of spammers and those that seek to confound them will continue to leapfrog each other. Few, if any, analysts predict that the outcome of this technological race will be spam-free Email inboxes.        
Yet another method of protecting consumers against unwanted Email is the blacklisting of senders and their IP addresses. Programs exist that block Emails from blacklisted senders. Internet service providers such as Abovenet and UUnet exercise pressure on their business consumers to adopt strict opt-in Email policies. But as noted above, spammers can switch internet service providers and/or Email addresses to evade detection and blocking of their Emails.
Yet another method of protecting consumers against unwanted Email is for the content of the Emails to be screened by artificial intelligence based software programs. Depending on the content and which words or phrases are found in the Email, Emails are then either blocked or routed to less important folders which the user is presumed to check less frequently. The problems with this method are                Spammers can easily avoid the use of phrases and words that are likely to trigger a bloc or a filtering criterion against spam. Conversely, if the Email rules and filters that apply to the content are too restrictive, some desired Email which the recipient would have liked to receive will get blocked or filtered out. (This is the reason that some of the filtering programs allow the user to review the Email that has been filtered or blocked—however, if the user needs to perform a review, this defeats the very purpose of the filtering software.)        It takes time and effort for the individual user to prioritize incoming Emails into multiple folders based on such rules.        